And dark.” He smirked. “Kind of like a very sexy thundercloud I know.”
“The last thing you remember, then. Whatever it was.”
Dulac’s face twisted with effort. “I was getting ready for the move. I had a couple of boxes of breakable things, and I carried them downstairs. I was putting the boxes in my trunk, and—” His eyes got huge. “Holy shit. I think someone kidnapped me.”
“That’s all?” Hazard said. He surged out of the chair. “That’s what you can give me? You were putting boxes in your trunk, and then it was lights out? Fucking bullshit dick-slit ball humping gaping raw asshole shit!”
Dulac had shrunk down in the bed, pulling the blanket up to his neck, and he whispered, “Pop-pop-pop.”
As quickly as the anger had come, it was gone. Hazard was exhausted. He moved over to the window, unwilling to sit, afraid he might fall asleep. Or, worse, afraid he might have to start talking to Dulac again. He parted the blinds. He looked out at the dirty light feathering the parking lot. He looked beyond it to the sky, where hills made a broken-backed serpent against the horizon. Dawn was almost here, and the thought of facing another day like this, without Somers, made Hazard think about the long drop to the pavement below.
He tried to run through the facts again. He tried to make his brain work. What did he know about the killer? He was a planner. He had some sort of interest in Hazard. He was smart and educated. He had a range of skills—he had planted the recording device in Hazard’s office, he had circumvented Mitchell’s security, he had even had the technical savvy to erase the videos from Mitchell’s security cameras that should have been safely stored in the cloud. Having Rasmussen as his accomplice explained some of his ability to evade the police—effectively, the Keeper had been able to be in two places at once. But what Hazard didn’t understand was how the Keeper had managed to convince Mitchell to let him inside. Mitchell knew not to let anyone inside, not anyone that he didn’t trust with his life. And Hazard could only think of a handful of people who met that criteria—and they were his friends. He felt himself coming up against the same dead ends again and again. For some reason, staring at his glassy reflection in the window, he thought of John McClane crawling through air ducts. Always another way around. Always a way nobody else had seen before.
Hazard’s eyes refocused; he met his own gaze in the glass. When his phone buzzed, for the second time in the small hours, he felt the universe aligning. He dragged it out of his pocket, saw a text from an unrecognized number, and followed the link it contained.
It showed a video stream in black and white. The angle was strange, a fish-eyed view set high in a wall; below, a sharp flight of stairs was visible. It took Hazard a moment to recognize the two figures: Somers and Nico, both of them asleep on the steps. A voice, electronically distorted to be unrecognizable, played over the phone’s speakers.
“Emery, it’s time to finish our game. You have two choices. As you can see, I have John-Henry safely locked away. If you don’t do exactly what I say—” The video stream cut to a grainy image that looked like it had been processed with light-enhancing software, showing a bucket and something small and white suspended above it. “—I’ll press a little button, and chlorine tablets will fall into buckets of ammonia. It’s a horrible way to die, Emery. I hope I’m making myself clear.”
“Holy shit,” Dulac said, trying to get out of bed. “Holy shit!”
“It’s clear,” Hazard said, his voice rough, although a part of him knew that the audio only ran in one direction.
“I want you to meet me at the Empire Fruit building. I’ll be waiting there for you. You can bring your gun, of course. And any other weapons you like. But you have to come alone. This is a showdown. Do you understand? Wahredua’s most brilliant detective pitted against the Keeper of Bees. If you get to me before sunrise, you can do whatever you like. I won’t have any weapons of my own. But if you don’t get here, I’ll press this little button and ride off into the sunset.” A pause, and then the voice added, “And, of course, there’s a chance you might die getting through my